I had the chance to write a post on the LSE Politics and Policy blog with Mark Williamson, a colleague on the Generationed City research team. We review recent work by Canadian researchers Markus Moos and Pablo Mendez about the shifting dimensions of income in Canadian cities.

The researchers operationalize the concept of ‘suburban ways of living’ to break apart the idea of suburbs being rather homogenous locales located outside of central areas. The researchers examine the ways that the internal geographies of Canadian cities are shifting and uncover some novel findings.

The findings of the research are interesting because they highlight the limitations of defining the suburbs as a geographically fixed ‘place’. While Canadian post-war suburbs have always contained a degree of complexity, the forces reshaping the geography of Canadian cities are working to create much more complex internal geographies, not easily explained by mere distance to the city centre. It is more useful to acknowledge that suburbs are not homogeneous landscapes and that they contain particular patterns of living that may be associated with particular forms of housing, tenure and commuting patterns.